Space Trader (working title)

[Tsunami]

A few screenies to start:

The rather sparse main menu (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie1.jpg)
Pirates take down a police ship (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie2.jpg)
A heavily-outnumbered police defending an asteroid base (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie3.jpg)

What is it?

Basically an Elite/Freelancer style game written in Delphi 2007. I've been working on it for a while casually, and it's been a 2D top-down game for most of its lifetime, but last year I decided to get more serious about programming, get better at the language, and teach myself OpenGL and GLSL. It doesn't actually *do* much yet but I've finished a lot of the engine stuff, and while it's far from finished, I'm taking a break from that to work on the fun gameplay-type stuff.

What I've got at the moment is the basic engine and the game which includes a faction system, simple combat AI that dodges attacks, patrols, and fires weapons intelligently, several types of weapons, dockable stations, and a WIP mining system. Multiplayer is in there but broken - I have a system based on DelphiX's DirectPlay that is disabled while I look for a better replacement.

The plan is that the finished game will be similar to Frontier or Freelancer, but with more RPG-like elements - something that would have made Freelancer's multiplayer much more enjoyable. That'll probably take the form of ship upgrades, crew experience, and character customization. I've got a class system planned out and the eventual aim is to have either a story-driven campaign or randomly generated missions for each profession.

Aaaand... that's my current project! Any feedback? :)

[phibermon]

It's looking really nice :) I'm a massive fan of elite style games, I would love to see somebody attempt the procedural world and galaxy generation of the frontier and first encouters games ;)

let me know when you have a demo to play with!

[Tsunami]

Will do :) Regarding procedural generation I think I'll probably go for the Elite 2 approach, ie have a bunch of main systems that I've designed and then a big chunk of procedurally generated stuff beyond that.

[chronozphere]

This looks quite good. :) How long have you been working on this?

I'd like to try it when it's finished.

[phibermon]

that's a good idea :) I've not much experience in procedural generation, but it amazes me that all those years ago, in pure machine code, (re-written for multiple systems!!) david braben managed to achive such a milestone! the seemless transitions between space and planet has still yet to be beaten. Oooh and if you don't know about it already, search for 'ffeD3d', some russian coders decompiled and extended Frontier : First Encounters (Elite 3) with direct3d (obviously) and all new models, few rendering techniques etc

They still rely on a hell of a lot of machine code from the original decompilation however, they can't really make it next gen without, pretty much, a re-write.

But satisfying to play to say the least :)

[Tsunami]

I was pretty hooked on a fan-made OpenGL (I think?) version of Frontier 2 many years ago... that's a big influence on me :)



This looks quite good. :) How long have you been working on this?

This version, around 6 months, mostly weekends as I am at university. I first tried to make it as a 2D point-and-click adventure-type game in Delphi 3 after I first played Freelancer - that was 2003, I was 13 :)

[WILL]

Woah! Too cool. I LOVED Freelancer. I think you've got yourself a fan already. ;)

Will you be planning on adding a trading system like Freelancer? I enjoyed being able to take cargo from one 'sector' where it cost you X amount and be able to travel to another 'sector' where the value was up to Y amount so you can make a profit.

I also like the idea of having multiple contracts/missions/jobs you can perform throughout the who game world. If you went with online play you could then have each faction 'respond' to a successful contract against them with an equal contract back against another faction. This would add some dimension as if a heavy amount of contracts between two factions are completed it would turn into a mini-war between the two. You could also possibly have special contracts (simulating major battle/conflicts) when such a situation happens in the online managed world.

The screenies look great. I'm excited about your project for sure. Please keep us up to date on your game as it progresses. Very cool.

[Tsunami]

Thanks for the ideas WILL!



Will you be planning on adding a trading system like Freelancer? I enjoyed being able to take cargo from one 'sector' where it cost you X amount and be able to travel to another 'sector' where the value was up to Y amount so you can make a profit.


That's something I definitely want to do. It'll probably be the base of one of the available career paths.

I spent a while today just tidying my entity system up into a nice neat hierarchy, which involved a lot of Find & Replace All renaming... that made it a lot easier to import ships from my ship editor (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie5.jpg), however. I also added a cockpit (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie4.jpg) in first-person mode, model WIP evidently!

[WILL]

That's something I definitely want to do. It'll probably be the base of one of the available career paths.

You could have all career paths allowing for a little bit of everything, but in some way restrict how well they can do them for those not related to their well career. :)

Cool ship editor. What do or will you use to design the ships with?

I've gotta say that I'd use the 3rd person style flying (much like Freelancer's mouse controlled approach) much more than the first person. I'm just not much of a pilot, I guess. :)

[Tsunami]

You could have all career paths allowing for a little bit of everything, but in some way restrict how well they can do them for those not related to their well career. :)

That's sort of what I had in mind. You'll be able to change ships (say switch from a mining ship to a fighter) whenever you like, but if your character's a miner, you'll do less damage, for example.


Cool ship editor. What do or will you use to design the ships with?

I'm creating the models in Maya and compiling them from OBJs into my own binary format. At the moment I mostly have very low poly models and low-resolution textures but I'll make time to improve them later.


I've gotta say that I'd use the 3rd person style flying (much like Freelancer's mouse controlled approach) much more than the first person. I'm just not much of a pilot, I guess. :)

I had similar input from my friends :) The control system I settled on works with either a joystick or mouse/keyboard - it feels very much like Freelancer in third person using the mouse, and a bit more like X-Wing or Freespace in first person using a joystick.

[NecroDOME]

...
Multiplayer is in there but broken - I have a system based on DelphiX's DirectPlay that is disabled while I look for a better replacement.
...


Will this suit your replacement?
http://www.overbyte.be/frame_index.html

Mixing OpenGL and DirectX... me like :)

Keep up the work!

[Tsunami]

That looks interesting. The only thing is I've just started using Lazarus to build my project - I spent today editing my code so that it can compile with both FreePascal and Delphi 2007. I'm very new to Lazarus/FPC though - what's the deal with Delphi components? Is it possible to convert them?

[Tsunami]

Oh balls... (http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/ballsballseverywhere.jpg)

I finally got around to adding a proper Half-life style "developer console" for spawning things, changing variables and running simple scripts. This is pretty much the limit of its capability, executing a script to spawn a ball object 500 times at random locations...

I have finally got Linux on my laptop. The only big thing in the way of compiling this all for Linux is OpenGL, are there any guides on using the Lazarus OpenGL context control? I gave it a try and looked at a demo but couldn't seem to make it work.

[marmin]

Are you doing this alone or do u need helpers?

And- maybe you can borrow code from this, frontier clone open source, its c++ but shouldn't be 2 hard to translate:

http://pioneer.sourceforge.net/ :nerd:

[Tsunami]

Are you doing this alone or do u need helpers?

And- maybe you can borrow code from this, frontier clone open source, its c++ but shouldn't be 2 hard to translate:

http://pioneer.sourceforge.net/ :nerd:


It's a solo project :)

I'll take a look at that project but I'm not sure I'll be able to use much - my game's quite different to Elite in a lot of ways.

[marmin]

ehmm..
The plan is that the finished game will be similar to Frontier

[Tsunami]

ehmm..
The plan is that the finished game will be similar to Frontier


But hopefully not TOO similar ;)

[WILL]

I think he was hoping to be able to help. ;)

Hey the more it's like Freelancer the more I'm gonna play it in the future. :) Heck I'll even do play testing for ya if you like. If you make a port for the Mac or Linux I can test it on those systems too. (Ordering my mac on Monday)

[Andreaz]

Nice looking project. I'm a big fan of Freelancer (and Starlancer, Freespace etc), but dont go down the procedural road. It just makes everything feel "off" imo.

I'm using ENet for my networking and its working fine. It's kind of low level (basically implementing reliable traffic over UDP/IP)

http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forum/index.php?topic=4814.msg42917#msg42917

[Tsunami]

I think he was hoping to be able to help. ;)

Sorry if that came across as a bit rude :) However this is something I've been trying to do since I first got Delphi so as my first real project it's something I want to do by myself as much as possible.


Nice looking project. I'm a big fan of Freelancer (and Starlancer, Freespace etc), but dont go down the procedural road. It just makes everything feel "off" imo.

I'm using ENet for my networking and its working fine. It's kind of low level (basically implementing reliable traffic over UDP/IP)

Thanks, I'll look into that :)

Random screenshot: http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/screenie8.jpg

There's not a lot of new stuff in this screenshot but I've been working on the AI a fair bit as well as the graphics code to make it a bit more OpenGL 3 compliant. I also put in a feature one of my friends requested, a padlock-style camera that stays focused on whatever you've got targetted at all times... I think the same thing's been in several flight sims and space shooter games.

[chronozphere]

This is looking really good. ;)

[Tsunami]

Time for an update to this thread...

http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/spacetrader_dec2010.jpg

The "Space Trader" game is still under development although unfortunately I switched earlier this year to working mainly in C++ for various reasons (library support was a big one, and I had a lot of problems with Lazarus too). As a result I have spent a lot of time since my posts here rewriting the game from the ground up in a different language. I guess that means it's not exactly relevant on this forum any more :P

However what I plan to do is make all of the features of my new 3d engine accessible to Pascal/Delphi programs as a DLL, and release it here when it's done if anyone's interested. At the moment it includes OpenGL 3 graphics and shaders, model and texture loading, rigid body physics powered by Bullet, and a basic GUI system. The plan would be to make it as simple and accessible as possible as I know it's never gonna compete with anything big like Ogre. Here's a screenshot of a Delphi program running it with the most basic scene possible, a character and a physics-enabled donut:

http://spacetrader.org.uk/spacetrader/demo.jpg

(this is kinda cheating, the scene is an engine preset and the Delphi program is 15 lines long :D)

[NecroDOME]

Looks nice. Do you have a small movie of your gameplay? I like to see it in action.

[code_glitch]

Wow, great work so far - wouldn't mind seeing it in action - although nothing beats a beta release ;).

[WILL]

Hey I was wondering if you're not moving forward with your old Delphi-based engine, would you be willing to eventually release the source for others to learn from it?

The game is looking good btw. I'll still play it even though it's not developed in Object Pascal anymore. I agree with NecroDOME too, I'd love to see some YouTube video of the gameplay in action. This will also attract potential fans to your game once it's released too. Hype isn't all hype you know. ;)

Hey if you're looking for inspiration, I found this cool Freelancer-style app for the iPad called 'Galaxy on Fire 2 (http://www.galaxyonfire.com/)'. Plays almost just like Freelancer, minus a few features.

[Tsunami]

Hey I was wondering if you're not moving forward with your old Delphi-based engine, would you be willing to eventually release the source for others to learn from it?

The game is looking good btw. I'll still play it even though it's not developed in Object Pascal anymore. I agree with NecroDOME too, I'd love to see some YouTube video of the gameplay in action. This will also attract potential fans to your game once it's released too. Hype isn't all hype you know. ;)

Hey if you're looking for inspiration, I found this cool Freelancer-style app for the iPad called 'Galaxy on Fire 2 (http://www.galaxyonfire.com/)'. Plays almost just like Freelancer, minus a few features.

I'll probably never release the whole thing because it most likely wouldn't be much help - my old code is a mess and it's all very specific to the game. If there's any specific bits you'd like though I could tidy them up and post those.

I'll try to get enough features working to make a video or small demo soon-ish - yesterday I put in weapons that actually cause damage so I'll be able to put together a battle scene at last :D

Unfortunately I don't have an iPad Will :(

[WILL]

Oh ok, I was hoping that such an engine's source would be handy should someone else wanted to make a space fighter simulator. I had thought about making a space sim myself not too long ago, but lack the 3D knowledge to do so competently though I am familiar with OpenGL for 2D and have dabbled with some VERY simple 3D.

Any chance that the game will be ported to Mac as well as Windows?

[Tsunami]

Trust me, the first iteration of this engine is not a good example for anybody ;)

Mac is unlikely as I don't own one to test with. I'm also using Microsoft VC++ for the new engine components, which may or may not play well with Macs, I've never tried it.

[farcodev]

good work :)